August 09, 2014

The Guardian is sinking fast under a welter of Zionist penned articles wantonly blurring distinctions between opinion and fact and fact and falsehood.

It all began with a calm factual article about the UK Jewish Film Festival's withdrawal from The Tricycle Theatre because of the latter's objection to the receipt of £1,400 from the Israeli embassy. There were Zionist reports of how the Tricycle had simply banned this generalist Jewish festival. In fact the Jewish Chronicle has a front page article now with the headline, Film festival BANNED, in spite of the facts of the case now being well known.

There has been tremendous coverage of this throughout the print media and on-line but the Zionists are in such a panic they are swarming all over The Guardian to smear BDS supporters and the Tricycle people as antisemitic.

The first I noticed was an editorial that could only have been written by Jonathan Freedland who, a friend of mine told me, has considerable editorial influence at The Guardian. I know The Guardian is often described as anti-Israel by Israel advocates but there are lines it rarely crosses so as to stay on the right side of the Zionist movement. And of course, without getting into details, how can it be anti-Israel if Jonathan Freedland writes for it and wields editorial influence?

Anyway, the editorial is headed, The Guardian view on Gaza and the rise of antisemitism.* I just did a word search for Gaza because I just had a feeling he wasn't writing about Gaza at all. I was right. The word Gaza doesn't appear in the text. Yup, in an article supposedly about Gaza and antisemitism Freedland has fulfilled an important part of the Zionist dream: he's made Gaza disappear. Actually, he does nod to the slaughter by reference to the (you guessed it) "conflict between Israel and Hamas".

He writes mostly about something that wasn't antisemitic at all and that's the Tricycle saga though he also detours to France and Germany where he writes of what would be genuine cases of antisemitism if only they could be verified by a more reliable source than himself. Apparently it is true that synagogues have been attacked in France but the first report of an attack on a synagogue was actually a counter-attack by Palestine solidarity demonstrators against the openly racist terrorist group, the Jewish Defense League (banned as terrorists in the USA, the UK and even in Israel) who had come from the synagogue to attack the demonstrators, the JDL having the protection of the police. Richard Seymour aka Lenin is very good on this.

Now, what else does he do? Ah of course, he gets downright silly over the boycott campaign:

Some have made the argument
that, if receiving money from a state implies endorsement of that
state’s policy, then the Tricycle ought to return the £725,000 it
receives from the taxpayer-funded Arts Council, lest that be read as
backing for, say, UK participation in the invasion of Iraq.

This shows the anti-BDSrs' failure to consider what BDS is aimed at achieving and on whose behalf. Many Palestinian groups have called for a boycott of Israel and that is what the solidarity movement supports. Israel is a foreign aid junkie and it gets privileged access to EU markets. The boycott movement is aims to neutralise that. Who among those oppressed by the war on Iraq is calling for a boycott? What could it achieve? Boycotting is not simply a principle, it is a tactic that could work against Israel, a joint colonial project of western powers.

In the same paragraph he comes close to saying that support for colonial settlement, ethnic cleansing and Jewish supremacy is an innate Jewish characteristic. In fairness he falls just short of that but look at what he does say:

most, not all, Jews feel bound up with Israel, even if that relationship
is one of doubt and anxiety. To demand that Jews surrender that
connection is to tell Jews how they might – and how they might not –
live as Jews. Such demands have an ugly history.

It's tempting simply to say, "Oh fuck off!" but let's not be nasty to the self-indulgent prick. He is saying that if most Jews support a political project then the rest of humanity has to accommodate that. As it happens, it's impossible to know what most Jews want because it's impossible, in the west anyway, to know who most Jews are. Thankfully, in spite of the ravings of one mad Zionist blogger, we don't have to register as Jews here.

But what if most Jews do support the State of Israel? So what? Does everyone have to support or tolerate the political persuasion of most Jews? I've seen Palestinian flags flying around London's East End. What if most Jews object, should they come down? No matter where you stand on the question of Palestine, support for a state, any state, is political and there is no reason why everyone should support the politics of a proportion or the entirety of any ethno-religious community, especially if the political persuasion is so clearly racist.

He ends on a totally bogus line:

Nor should [Jews] be required to declare their distance from Israel as a
condition for admission into polite society. We opposed such a question
being put to all Muslims after 9/11 and, though the cases are not
equivalent, the same logic applies here

The logic is not the same. The UK "Jewish" Film Festival came to the Tricycle declaring their support for and from Israel. Tricycle said that they could not host Israeli embassy funded events at the present time. The equivalent for Muslims would be if a Muslim group asked the Tricycle to host an event celebrating 9/11. Tricycle did not ask the UKJFF where they stand on Palestine. UKJFF volunteered the information, evidently with some pride. And that flight from logic was in an editorial in a supposedly serious liberal newspaper of record.

So who's next? Ah yes, someone I'd never heard of before called Hadley Freeman. Now if that self-seeking tosh from Freedland wasn't enough, on the same day (yesterday August 8, 2014) we get a lecture from another zionist at The Guardian - two on the same day and both saying the same thing in response to the same thing. Here goes, but we probably won't need as much detail as the previous one.

It's headed Please don’t tell me what I should think about Israel. Now I suppose from the heading it could go either way. Zionists are forever trying to impugn the Jewish identity of those who, like me, think the wrong thoughts on Israel but the sub-heading is an early giveaway:

To a liberal American Jew in Britain, the Gaza crisis reveals some very unsavoury attitudes among those on the left

Uh oh, it's those lefties again, those nasty people who as an article of faith object to colonial settlement and ethnic cleansing. Right, a quick scan, I promise (myself).

Well they certainly had a disproportionate number of refugees but the state was made by a well armed, well trained and well organised army, or armies if you count the minor terror gangs. In fairness you can't quite tell if Ms Freeman is calling out the myth or promoting it.

How about, they suck? Well she skipped straight to "you suck" with a false allegation of antisemitism leveled at the pro-Israel Rory Carroll:

This week it was reported in this paper that it’s “unthinkable” in Hollywood to criticise Israel (that pesky Jewish mafia – displease them and they’ll force-feed you matzos until you explode).

The article was actually about how new Israel-critical voices were being heard and support for Israel was rather muted. Needless to say this style guru offered nothing to refute the idea that criticism of Israel used to be ""unthinkable" in Hollywood".
And then there came the "everything sucks" whataboutery with a swipe at "India’s not exactly perfect human rights record" and the UK's war on Iraq.

So what happened to "they suck?" Well they, of course, are the Palestinians and like the Freedland editorial, Gaza gets a mention in the headline (well the sub-heading) but the Gazans are absent from the article. It's all about Jews according to these two articles that appeared in today's print edition of The Guardian.

Now the third hasbara by smear piece I saw on The Guardian website was published the day before the previous two. Headed, Obsessive Gaza coverage is fanning antisemitism, thankfully it's so ludicrous I can dismiss it out of hand. It's basically a plea not report on the atrocities committed by a state that's given more privileged access to EU markets than any other non-European state and receives more US aid than any other state. Oh ok, here's a taste:

As it happens it used to be the case that you could tell when Israel was behaving badly without knowing what it was doing by the number of allegations of antisemitism that flew around. This guy so realised that Israel was on the PR ropes he went out and formed yet another antisemitism project. But now the media is reporting more the crimes of Israel. The Daily Mail has been a bit of a revelation. The Beeb was pretty dodgy at first but there have been some useful appearances and tweets by Orla Guerin and Jeremy Bowen. Channel 4 too has been very informative on tv and in tweets.

Even The Times refused to take in an advert containing the nastiest racist hasbara I would ever have seen in a mainstream UK paper. Israel's sheer ferocity has had the facts of its violent racist nature speaking for themselves and there does seem to have been a new-found openness in the media to reporting stuff that paints Israel in an unfavourable light.

Whatever has happened it has led to some influential hasbarista or other at The Guardian asserting enough control to get 2 articles in today's print edition that falsely allege antisemitism at BDS whilst clumsily coming close to insisting that support for the racist war criminal State of Israel is somehow intrinsic to the Jewish identity.

And hold that thought about The Times. The Guardian has now, via the blog of Roy Greenslade, announced that it will be running the advert in its Monday edition. This is particularly dismaying because Times owner Rupert Murdoch is very pro-Israel and The Guardian is supposed to be liberal or even left-leaning. Let's have a look at what Greenslade is saying:

The Times
is under attack for refusing to run an advert about the conflict in
Gaza. The paper is accused of being part of a British media "infamously
skewed against Israel."

Straight away there is something wrong here. Greenslade must know that The Times of all papers is not "skewed against Israel". He is also of course using his blog to announce that The Guardian is joining in this attack on The Times for a rare instance of it doing the decent thing.

Greenslade goes on to quote from the ad and one its makers, Shmuley Boteach, without any question, criticism or correction of his own:

It [the ad] calls on President Obama and other political leaders across the world "to condemn Hamas's use of children as human shields", which amounts to "child sacrifice".

It's left to me to point out that no evidence at all has been presented to support the "human shields" endless run of repeat stories. It doesn't point out that it is actually Israel killing this large number of children and even more parents. Nowhere does Greenslade contradict what the ad or its maker says, so for one racist ad these extreme murderous Zionists get two bouts of publicity one of which is free.

And we get more quotes from Boteach:

At a time when Israel is fighting for its very existence against the
genocidal terrorists of Hamas, the British media, already infamously
skewed against Israel, refuses a paid ad that every major American
outlet... was proud to run as a full page ad

Criticism came there none.

The only partial distancing of The Guardian from the content of the racist ad is Greenslade's parting line:

But the Guardian's acceptance of an advert does not mean, of course, that it endorses the views and claims made within it.

Well it definitely means that The Guardian finds such racism acceptable and it does mean that some Zionist or other at The Guardian wants the ad run because for the past 3 days they have been pulling out all the stops to place The Guardian firmly in the Zionist camp.

Curiously I noticed Roy Greenslade hasn't tweeted his article but he has recently done two tweets supporting demonstrations for Gaza. It's almost like his heart wasn't in this piece. I wonder why he wrote it.

Anyway, I have an update on Jonathan Freedland's editorial from reading the print edition. Don't worry I didn't buy
it nor would I. The title is completely different. Gone (again) is "Gaza" and
instead it's headed, Intolerable Intolerance. Got that? Most of the article is about the Tricycle Theatre and after time to think The Guardian is accusing the theatre of intolerable intolerance. So what, apart from self-indulgent whingeing, are the Zionists going to do?